Connecting developers across projects, languages, and backgrounds.

Open Source Bridge is an annual conference focused on building open source community and citizenship through four days of technical talks, hacking sessions, and collaboration opportunities. Participants include developers, hardware hackers, community organizers, and people involved in the business of open source.

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Open Source Citizenship

What are the rights and responsibilities of an open source citizen? We’re exploring what open source means to us, what it offers, where we struggle, and why we do this day in and day out, even when we’re not paid for it.

Innovative Track Structure

Our session tracks are technology agnostic, based around shared community experiences and focus on the similarities between projects, not the differences. View the tracks.

Hacker Lounge

The geekery doesn’t end when the sessions do. We’re also running a hacker lounge for code sprints, bug bashes, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling and taking in the vibe.

100% Volunteer-Run

Your software is peer-produced. Why not your conference? Open Source Bridge is pioneered and planned by a team of open source developers and technologists. What’s more, we’ve built an open source application to manage talk proposals.

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On June 29 we came together to acknowledge all that the Open Source Bridge community has built over the last ten years. Christie Koehler started the day with a look back at the history of the conference and our local tech community.

Together we created an amazing body of work that will continue to influence others. We should all be proud of this.

Kronda Adair followed with a personal history of her experiences at Open Source Bridge, and of building her business. She offered these take-aways on the work we still need to do to create a truly inclusive and equitable industry.

Listen the Startup podcast series about Arlan Hamilton, the founder of Backstage capital. You’ll learn what radical wealth redistribution looks like. You’ll upgrade your definition of hustle. Hint: it’s not taking a summer off and flying around the country to get 50 of your rich friends to give you 5 million dollars and then starting a VC fund.

If there’s one theme that pervades my experience in tech, it’s that the people who have traditionally have the least access to money and resources are the best at sharing what they do have with others. But as Arlan likes to say, we’re done settling for crumbs. We’re here for the cake.

Make a list of the products and services you regularly use and recommend to others and then find some black and brown entrepreneurs who provide those services and start using them and recommending them to your networks.

If you have the skills and the free time, make a website for a business owner who doesn’t have one.

Pay someone who’s given you free advice that helped you grow your business or advance your career. In cash.

Stop looking for underrepresented people to be your junior developers and start looking for us to be your CEOs, CTOs, and CFOs. I’m tired of watching companies hire us for VP of diversity positions and then blocking real change. There’s a lot of white people out here talking about they want to help but you don’t want to give up any of YOUR privilege. That’s not how it works.

These are just a few suggestions that I’ll leave you with as you go and consider your unconference topics for the day.

Lastly, I want to give you an easy metric to measure by so you know if your efforts are making real change:

Find ways to transfer MONEY, ACCESS, NETWORKS and POWER to those who have the least of those things.

If you’re not doing that, then you need to work harder.

We had a full set of unconference sessions, spanning the breadth of our community’s interests.